The last day before winter vacation and the kids were a little, well... worked up. Thank goodness, I had an easy day planned.
Day 2 of Project: More Investigation and Inspiration
Students went to the computer lab and recorded images of actual building in the shapes of cylinders, pyramids, cones, and rectangular prisms that have been built. These were saved on a google document that both classes can view.
Sample pages from the google drive shared document:
The Georgia Common Core Units we are using are excellent. I'm amazed at how well everything flows, spirals and fits the standards. However, I decided to go with Mac Bay's decision to use their Designing a City unit to study volume. One major drawback is that the project does not allow kids to explore the learning targets of how changing dimensions affects the volume of cylinders and prisms. I hope to build in specific investigations for these and/or Socratic Dialog to cover these questions. However, these snow days are not helping!
Day 1 of Project: Investigation
Students are stoked to do this project. For the first day, we discussed what a blue print is, looked at examples, allowing students to make observations on qualities of a blueprint. Then, each student received graph paper and sketched out their ideas for their model city. During this time, students were able to work out misconceptions about 2 dimensional drawings vs. 3 dimensional drawings. They also worked through difficulty with space allotment and necessities such as parking lots, and sidewalks.
Warm-up, shown below, followed by Test 3A
1) Grade Homework
2) Triangle Inequality mini-lesson (Direct instruction, but with clip together blocks for each student to try out the theorem.)
3) Practice Test, graded in class

1) w.u - shared in photo to the right:
2) Pythagorean Theorem Scavenger Hunt
3) Assignment: page 140, 17 - 27 odds
1) Grade homework
2) Go over yesterday's ticket out the door
3) Direct Instruction - adding the distance formula to the ISN
4) Assignment: Complete student work page of ISN